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Our students do not learn what we teach. It is this simple and profound reality that means that assessment is perhaps the central process in effective instruction. If our students learned what we taught, we would never need to assess. We could simply catalog all the learning experiences we had organized for them, certain in the knowledge that this is what they had learned.
But of course, anyone who has spent more than a few hours in a classroom knows this hardly ever happens. No matter how carefully we design and implement the instruction, what our students learn cannot be predicted with any certainty. It is only through assessment that we can discover whether the instructional activities in which we engaged our students resulted in the intended learning. Assessment really is the bridge between teaching and learning.
Formative Assessment
Of course, the idea that assessment can help learning is not new, but what is new is a growing body of evidence that suggests that attention to what is sometimes called formative assessment, or assessment for learning, is one of the most pow- erful ways of improving student achievement. Different people have different views about what exactly counts as formative assessment. Some think it should be applied only to the minute-to- minute and day-to-day interactions between stu- dents and teachers, while others also see interim, or benchmark, tests administered every six to ten weeks as formative. For my part, I believe that any assessment can, potentially, be formative, which is why I suggest that to describe an assess- ment as formative is what Gilbert Ryle (1949) de- scribed as a "category mistake" (p. 16; ascribing to something a property it cannot have).
The term formative should apply not to the assessment but to the function that the evidence generated by the assessment actually serves. For example, a seventh-grade teacher had given her students an English language arts test, under test conditions, and collected the students' test re- sponses. Most teachers would then try to grade the students' responses, add helpful feedback, and return the graded papers to the students the following day. On this occasion, however, the teacher did not grade the papers. She quickly read through them and decided that the follow- ing day each...